The present invention relates to a job status monitoring system for monitoring operation or statuses of jobs executed on a computer, and in particular, to a technique effectively applied to a job status monitoring system for monitoring statuses of jobs by efficiently displaying monitoring items and information items of failure on a job status monitoring screen.
In a conventional job status monitoring system running on a computer, information items indicating statuses of scheduled jobs to be executed later and a status of a current job currently in execution are collected and are displayed on a monitoring screen in a first display method. When the current job in execution abnormally terminates due to, for example, occurrence of an error, the current job in execution and scheduled jobs which possibly are affected by the current job are displayed in a second display method other than the first display method to thereby explicitly notify the occurrence of abnormality to the operator monitoring the job statuses.
For example, there has been well known a network monitoring method in which, for example, at change of a monitoring status of an object or item being displayed using a first mark, a preceding status is displayed using a second mark other than the first mark and a current status is displayed using the first mark. This operation is repeatedly conducted at a predetermined interval of time in a dynamic way so that the operator visually recognizes the status change. Reference is to be made to JP-A-9-62542.
In the prior art, statuses of jobs normally executed and those of jobs executed only once per year or month are also displayed on the monitor screen. Therefore, to monitor a complex job a large number of jobs, the statuses of the jobs displayed on the monitor screen lead to a problem of difficulty, that is, the monitoring operation of a large number of jobs cannot be efficiently conducted.